necrogamy means posthumous marriage, a legal state where a deceased person is retroactively considered to have been married for legal purposes, such as inheritance. It carries an Arena rating of 1357, earned across 26 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, necrogamy ranks #405 of 17,149 for Most Exacting Words, #491 of 17,131 for Scariest Words, #1,746 of 17,128 for Most Ponderous Words, #3,949 of 17,163 for Funniest Words.
Why “necrogamy” is a great word
NECROGAMY — [Noun] A legally recognized union solemnized when at least one party is deceased, typically formalized to secure inheritance or legitimize an heir. From the Greek nekros ("dead body, corpse") and -gamia ("marriage"), from gamos ("marriage"). Unlike "posthumous marriage," the general descriptive term, or "levirate marriage," a duty-bound union among the living, necrogamy is the stark, ceremonial contract with absence itself. It is the officiant's words echoing in a cold chapel, the archival scent of a death certificate beside the marriage license, and the solemn press of a stamp on a document that names a corpse—a legal fiction created to impose order upon the most irrevocable of silences.
Etymology
From necro- + -gamy.
noun
- Posthumous marriage, a legal state where a deceased person is retroactively considered to have been married for legal purposes, such as inheritance.e.g.“These accounts seem to imply, indeed to depict, necrogamy (copulation with a corpse) in the netherworld…” — 2009 May 7, Peter Metevelis, “Japanese Flood Myths”, in Japanese Mythology and the Primeval World: A Comparative Symbolic Approach, iUniverse, →ISBN, page 425:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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